The differences between the technological and biological cells are ones of scale, but not function. The function is to embody complexity in the form of a conduit or dissipative structure which most effectively accelerates the degradation and dissipation of a fuel or energy gradient. A key requirement is that the energy intensive complexity must at least be compensated by the flow through the conduit. That is, the cell must process enough energy to at least “break-even” in its self-assembly and maintenance. Self-organization of dissipative structures, simple at first, must be coded in information as complexity increases as the probability of their formation becomes equally less likely with increases in complexity.

The technological cell functions like a biological one in that it is an organized structure that functions much like a siphon, pulling in resources and energy, feeding them through a conduit of complex metabolism and then exporting product into the environment along with waste heat and material. Once the thermodynamic gradient between high grade energy and waste heat is established, it can be self sustaining. As heat is exhausted into the environment, more combustion can occur within the cellular metabolism without temperatures rising to a degree that would damage or destroy the metabolic machinery. Any cell which operates at a loss, failing to cover its fixed and variable costs, will eventually die or in the technological realm, go bankrupt. Cells that provide “profit” take in more energy than used by the metabolism and are able to reproduce with the excess energy and resources. You may find this in rapidly expanding technological cell lines like “Starbucks” whose income must far outweigh expense. Rapid growth in cells can occur in a situation like this. But unfortunatly for many human RNA that form a part of the technological cell metabolism, working with machines to produce the output, their portion of the energy/resource input can be squeezed so as to create a greater difference between the income/expense ratio which can be captured by the “owners” of the cell line or company. Attending a specialized school or obtaining a license to become a rarer and desired functioning RNA can sometimes work to increase pay or a portion of income, but this is becoming less so as the nucleoli or schools are increasingly taking their student’s future earnings through debt, even as the environment offers fewer and fewer opportunities for employment, income and growth.

It appears that a healthy ecosystem can support a population between one and ten million humans. Going forward, due to sudden climate change, we will have anything but a stable and healthy ecosystem. There’s no reason to believe that the current episode of malignant growth will be any less damaging to the human population than the Toba eruption. Conversion to wind and solar power, which will require increasing and ongoing industrial activity, will at best only maintain “break-even” for some proportion of currently existing technological cells for a short while, before sounding the death knell for the ecosystem. Creating solar and wind energy gathering devices does not at all address the tendency towards malignant growth and associated damages to the ecosystem.

Currently Reading

Favorite Quotes

For explaining why humans are odd
To Varki and Brower we applaud
A great mystery they solved
With denial we evolved
And created the Higgs, overshoot, and God

Denial not only makes us believe in god, it is god, because denial created us, and denial may destroy us.

The human brain, the God it believes in, and the overshoot it enabled and denies, all resulted from the same improbable genetic adaptation that occurred about 100,000 years ago.

Denial is the reality that must be most aggressively denied to avoid collapsing the house of cards that keeps us functioning.

The most amazing thing about human overshoot is that we do not discuss it.

You know you are in trouble when reduced CO2 emissions from an economic collapse caused by low-cost oil depletion is not sufficient to prevent civilization collapse from climate change caused by previously emitted CO2.

Our only choices are do we want to fall from a higher elevation later, or climb down from a lower elevation sooner?

Things that can’t continue usually stop too late.

Truth is like poetry and most people hate poetry.

All 8 billion of us owe our existence to a six-inch layer of topsoil and the fact it rains; 6 billion of us also owe our existence to nitrogen fertilizer created from natural gas by Haber-Bosch factories.

While it digs its own grave, all the mind can do is entertain fantasies and create excuses.

When the only paying job in town is sawing off the branch which you are sitting on, you….saw away! You might refuse to saw and hang yourself from that branch, but the end is the same anyway, and that option is much less fun. (Cynic @Megacancer)

It is remarkable that a brain emerged from a cloud of hydrogen and figured out the laws of physics that governed, and possibly made inevitable, its own creation and destruction.

We have met the oblivious and they are us.

All 8 billion of us originated from one small tribe in Africa about 100,000 years ago that gave birth to a child with an improbable mutation for a more powerful brain that denied reality. The other tribes were soon toast and we took over the planet. We’re all close cousins. I love you all. Except the deniers.

Meaning comes from understanding why we can understand there is no meaning.

Way too many smart people with big reputations are wrong about everything that matters. Something’s gonna happen that gives them an excuse not to have to admit they were in denial.

One of the most, if not the most, precious and rare things in the universe is the human brain. We have a cosmic obligation to use it and to confirm it works.

Fire to cooking to intelligence to denial to god to plotting to capital punishment to self-domestication to Apollo 11 to 7 billion too many.